On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 06:16:19PM +0100, Christiaan Briggs wrote:
On 10 Aug 2006, at 5:24 PM, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
Expand, then, on your point, based on Wikipedia's article count and sustained network transfer rates.
I don't know of any way to prove this point when it comes to Wikipedia. If people are put off by wiki markup (which I know, anecdotally, they are) this is not going to show up in any Wikipedia data I know of. Possibly edit clicks vs. exits?
Maybe. I think you're right: there's no wikipedia-based way to tell if the requirement to use wikitext puts off potential wikipedia editors.
But again: the amount of wikitext markup syntax you have to carry around in your head to use it approaches zero more closely than anything else I've ever worked with.
We require people to learn how a car works in order to take advantage of the extended capabilities of being able to drive to places, and that's *much* more complicated than wikitext. :-)
However, I think I have enough experience trying to get people to participate on Wikipedia and on our local intranet (which uses MediaWiki) to be worthy of reporting. I also have my own personal experience, which is that I don't like using wiki markup, I don't like relearning it each time I use it, and I don't like seeing a sea of monospaced text every time I use it. So I understand their point of view.
People are certainly entitled to their own tastes.
In any case my point has already been answered. There are already moves afoot to prioritise and bring some sort of WYSIWYG to MediaWiki from what some people have said.
And, regardless what you may think from what I've said, I have no problem with that. Whether I think that work deserves a higher priority than other things is a different issue, but since I am not, and I don't think you are, writing code, what we think matters only anecdotally.
Cheers, -- jra